Back in 2005 I wrote a post called Cancel those “old” credit cards. This article predates widespread data breaches, subscription creep, and real-time transaction alerts. Yet the core lesson remains unchanged: unused credit cards still carry risk. If anything, the problem has only become subtler and easier to miss.
The post itself was a recap. What happened when I forgot to cancel an old CIBC credit card; in fact, the exact quote is:
About a month ago I got my monthly CIBC Visa statement. Now, I stopped using this card about a year ago, in favor of a President’s Choice Mastercard (which gives me grocery points). I open the statement assuming my normal 50 cent credit balance (I like pissing off these folks by overpaying by less than a dollar, and thus their systems then send me monthly statements, costing them money), but NO, I owed $60!
The writing style is very much on the rant side of things, and for some reason, I hadn’t figured out that bold might work just as well as overly capitalizing words for emphasis.
After a ranting explanation of how I got the fee taken off the bill, I summed things up with:
The Moral of this Essay?
- If I had CANCELed this card, this would NOT have happened in the first place!
- ALWAYS check your credit card statements (I find at least 1 or 2 spurious charges on my cards EVERY YEAR).
- With all of the personal information theft going on (if you have GM Visa card, you are now a victim) having the minimum points of attack (i.e. credit cards) minimizes your possible damage in this kind of incident.
All of these points are valid (if not a little overly dramatic). I am impressed that I actually caught the whole identity-theft angle on this as well, but it is important to cancel cards you are not using, or they can bite you in the butt.
